In Conversation with Alok Vajpeyi
Principal Associate, Khaitan and Co.
1. Your journey from law school to becoming a Principal Associate at Khaitan & Co has undoubtedly been shaped by significant learning experiences and milestones. Could you take us through this journey and share the key moments that defined your career in dispute resolution?
Alok Vajpeyi:
Every young lawyer is told, at some point, that law school teaches you the rules of the game, but real learning begins the day you are thrown into open water and expected to swim. My own journey has largely been that story, repeated at every stage, each time in slightly deeper water.
I graduated from Institute of Law, Nirma University in 2018, and joined Singhania & Co., where I worked on international arbitration and commercial litigation. My very first matter was a pharmaceutical international commercial arbitration, and I remember it less for the law involved than for the sheer intensity of the introduction it offered. There was no gentle build-up, no easing in. It was, quite literally, trial by fire, and I have come to believe that there is no better teacher than a genuinely difficult first matter. It forces you to grow up as a lawyer far faster than comfort ever could.
The moment that truly shaped me, however, came a little later, while I was a Senior Associate at Khaitan & Co. I was given the opportunity to argue an ICC institutional international commercial arbitration, and around the same time, to conduct cross-examination in a couple of other arbitration matters. I still remember the nervous energy of standing up to cross-examine a witness for the first time, acutely aware that this was not a moot court exercise with a friendly bench offering guidance, but a real proceeding with real consequences. John Henry Wigmore once called cross-examination "the greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth", and it was only once I had actually conducted one that I understood why he chose the word "engine". It is not a single clever question that wins the day; it is the quiet, cumulative power of careful preparation, one question building on the last. That early exposure to oral advocacy, cross-examination, and written submissions, considerably earlier than a conventional litigation career path typically allows, is something I remain genuinely grateful for. Arbitration, in that sense, has been a generous teacher to young lawyers willing to put in the work.
Speaking engagements and lectures have played their own understated but important role in this journey. My political science professor taught about the discipline of “sharpening the saw”, taking the time to hone one's own tools rather than simply using them relentlessly, and I think teaching does exactly that for a litigator. Preparing to explain a complex legal principle, such as the concept of floating seat in international arbitration, or the interplay between FEMA and criminal law, to an audience that has not necessarily studied it, forces you to strip an argument down to its simplest, most honest form. There is nowhere to hide behind jargon. Every lecture or panel discussion I have had the opportunity to be part of, whether on arbitration-related topic or white-collar crime-related topic, has, quite unexpectedly, made me sharper in the rooms that matter most: the tribunal room and the courtroom.
Joining Khaitan & Co. in November 2020 as an Associate was the next significant step up, not merely a change of address, but a genuine widening of scope. The firm's Dispute Resolution and White Collar Crime practice exposed me to shareholder disputes, regulatory investigations, and international arbitration, frequently layered within a single matter. The progression since then, from Associate to Senior Associate to my current role as Principal Associate, has felt less like ticking off a checklist of promotions, and more like a gradual shift in responsibility, from focusing purely on my own preparation and performance, to now also thinking about strategy, mentoring juniors, and holding the overall shape of a matter in view.
There is also a quieter, more public marker of this journey. A number of matters I have had the opportunity to argue or advise on have resulted in reported orders of various High Courts and the National Company Law Tribunal. I find this genuinely reassuring, not because of what it says about any individual matter, but because it means the work exists independently of how it is described in an interview such as this one. It is a form of accountability that keeps a litigator honest.
Looking back, I do not think this journey has been a single defining leap so much as a series of moments where I was handed slightly more responsibility than I felt entirely ready for, my first pharmaceutical arbitration, my first cross-examination, my first ICC hearing, my first lecture, and each time, choosing to prepare hard enough to meet the moment rather than shrink from it. As the saying goes, luck is simply what happens when preparation meets opportunity, and if there is one piece of continuity running through this journey, it is that belief, tested and confirmed, matter after matter.
2. Has there been a mentor or professional influence who significantly shaped your approach to law and leadership? If so, what is the most valuable lesson you learned from them?
Alok Vajpeyi:
Mentorship, in my experience, rarely arrives as a formal lesson. It arrives in fragments, a comment in passing, a decision observed from across the room, a question you ask once and carry with you for years. Two people stand out clearly when I think about who has shaped me, one from law school and one from practice, and interestingly, both taught me lessons less about the law itself and more about how to lead people through it.
The first is Dr. Purvi Pokhariyal, who was Dean of the Institute of Law, Nirma University during my years there as a student, and who today serves as Dean, School of Law, Forensic Justice & Policy Studies, and Campus Director at the National Forensic Sciences University (NFSU), Delhi Campus. What I learned from her had far less to do with statutes and case law, and far more to do with leadership and the quiet art of reading people. I once asked her a fairly direct question: how does one lead people considerably more senior, more experienced, or simply older than oneself? Her answer has stayed with me since. She said that every person who walks into a room carries a certain expectation of what they are there to get out of that interaction, and the real skill of leadership lies in reading that expectation accurately and responding to it in a balanced way, neither overpromising to please, nor underdelivering out of caution. I have carried that lesson into every team I have worked with since. Before walking into a client meeting or a strategy discussion with a senior colleague, I have learned to pause and ask myself a version of her question: what does this person expect to walk out of this room with, and how do I meet that expectation honestly, without compromising the larger objective? If I were to put her philosophy in her own spirit, I imagine she would say something like, “Authority is rarely given by title, it is earned the moment people sense that you understand what they need before they have to say it aloud.”
The second is Manavendra Mishra, Partner at Khaitan & Co., who leads the team I work with. If Dr. Pokhariyal taught me how to read a room, Manavendra has taught me, largely through quiet observation rather than direct instruction, how to read a matter. I have learned a great deal simply by watching him work over the years, far too much to summarise in a single answer, but if I were to single out the most significant lesson, it would be his consistently practical, outcome-driven approach to disputes. Rather than defaulting to the traditional, and often reflexive, escalation of litigation through every available forum and appeal, his strategic instinct is almost always oriented towards closure, towards identifying the shortest, most commercially sensible route to actually resolving a client's problem, rather than keeping a matter alive for the sake of the fight itself. Watching him work, I have come to understand that the measure of a good disputes lawyer is not how skilfully one can prolong a proceeding, but how decisively one can bring it to a close on terms that genuinely serve the client's interest. If I were to capture the essence of what he has taught me in his own likely words, it would be something like, “A litigator's real job is not to win the argument for its own sake, it is to solve the client's problem, and sometimes the two are not the same thing.”
3. Commercial arbitration has become the preferred mechanism for resolving complex business disputes. In your experience, what are the most common strategic mistakes parties make during arbitration, and how can they better prepare to achieve favorable outcomes?
Alok Vajpeyi:
Over the course of advising and appearing in arbitration proceedings, certain strategic errors recur with striking regularity, often regardless of the sophistication of the parties involved. In my experience, these tend to fall into the following recognisable patterns.
1. Treating arbitration as litigation with a different label. Parties often import habits developed in court litigation, excessive procedural applications, voluminous pleadings, and adversarial posturing at every stage, without appreciating that arbitration is designed to reward efficiency and precision rather than volume. Tribunals generally expect focused, disciplined submissions and are considerably less tolerant of delay tactics than courts may be.
2. Underinvesting in the drafting of the arbitration agreement. A significant proportion of disputes over jurisdiction, seat, and applicable law arise not from the substance of the underlying commercial disagreement, but from the arbitration clause itself having been treated as boilerplate during contract negotiation. A clause that clearly addresses seat, governing law, institutional rules, and language of proceedings prevents avoidable, and often expensive, satellite disputes from arising later.
3. Inadequate early case assessment. Parties often commit to a position before conducting a realistic, dispassionate assessment of the merits, evidence, and quantum. This tends to result in unrealistic settlement expectations and poor allocation of resources from the outset.
4. Not conducting a proper pre-dispute evidence analysis. Closely related to the above, parties frequently treat evidence review as a task to be completed progressively alongside the proceeding, rather than exhaustively before strategy is finalised. I have seen matters where a party committed to a particular version of facts in pleadings, only for the documentary record produced later to tell a materially different story, forcing a credibility-damaging retreat from an earlier position. A comprehensive evidence audit conducted before pleadings are drafted, rather than after, is one of the most important, and most frequently skipped, steps in arbitration strategy.
5. Neglecting document and witness management from the outset. Arbitration timelines are considerably more compressed than litigation, and parties that delay organising documents or preparing witnesses until pleadings close often find themselves at a disadvantage during evidence and cross-examination.
6. Over-relying on oral testimony in disputes that can only realistically be adjudicated on documents. I have seen considerable strategic energy invested in extensive cross-examination in matters that, by their nature, turned almost entirely on the documentary record, where the oral evidence ultimately added little weight to the tribunal's reasoning. Correctly identifying, at the outset, whether a dispute will be won through testimony or through a well-organised documentary trail materially changes where preparatory effort and resources ought to be directed.
7. Failure to appreciate the tribunal's perspective. Advocacy that is persuasive before a domestic court does not always resonate with an international tribunal accustomed to different procedural norms, evidentiary conventions, and standards of proof.
Taken together, these patterns point to a fairly consistent conclusion. Favourable outcomes in arbitration are rarely the product of the most aggressive advocacy, but rather the product of early discipline: engaging counsel before disputes fully crystallise, conducting a realistic and evidence-led merits assessment from day one, maintaining rigorous document and witness management throughout, and approaching the process with the efficiency, precision, and tribunal-awareness that arbitration, by design, is meant to reward.
4. Having handled matters involving shareholder disputes, white-collar crime, and FEMA, how do you approach cases that involve overlapping regulatory, commercial, and criminal law issues? What role does strategic litigation play in such matters?
Alok Vajpeyi:
Matters at the intersection of FEMA, corporate and commercial law, and criminal law require a fundamentally different mindset from a single-track dispute. In an ordinary commercial claim, one may be able to isolate the contractual issue and ask whether there has been a breach. In these matters, the same transaction may be examined simultaneously through the lens of shareholder rights, foreign exchange compliance, corporate governance, money laundering, or alleged fraud. The first task is therefore not to draft the first pleading or rush to the most familiar forum. It is to build a complete map of the possible exposures: who may bring a claim, which regulator may take interest, what criminal allegations could be made, what documents may be seized or disclosed, and how an adverse finding in one proceeding could affect another. I often describe this as understanding the whole chessboard before moving a piece.
I have seen shareholder disputes where FEMA compliance questions, related-party transactions, or questions around the movement of funds become tactical levers in what began as a control or oppression dispute. Sometimes a criminal complaint is filed not because criminal relief is genuinely the principal objective, but because it changes the negotiating environment, creates reputational pressure, or seeks to place the opposing side on the defensive. That does not mean every complaint is tactical or that regulatory exposure is somehow less serious. It means that counsel must understand both the legal substance and the litigation function of the step being taken. A party that treats a FEMA issue as merely a technical compliance point may miss its significance in a boardroom, before the NCLT, or in settlement discussions; equally, a party that uses criminal allegations casually may create credibility and conduct problems that ultimately damage its commercial case.
Strategic litigation in this setting is therefore not simply about choosing the strongest cause of action. The choice of forum, the timing of an application, and the sequencing of steps across regulators, criminal courts, civil courts, arbitral tribunals, and company law forums are themselves forms of advocacy. There are occasions when the immediate objective is to preserve documents or prevent dissipation of assets; on others, it may be to secure interim protection, clarify the factual record, or avoid allowing the other side to establish a narrative first. The sequence matters. Filing in the wrong forum too early can foreclose a better remedy later, while waiting too long can allow evidence, assets, or commercial relationships to move beyond reach. The best strategy is usually the one that creates pressure in a disciplined way while keeping the ultimate commercial objective in view.
The same complexity arises when a white-collar investigation overlaps with a commercial arbitration. A document produced in the arbitration may later be examined by an investigating agency; an admission made in a response to a regulator may be deployed by the counterparty to support its contractual claim; and a witness prepared for one forum may have to answer questions in another, under a different procedural framework. I have learned that a position must be tested not only for whether it helps in the immediate proceeding, but also for how it will read six months later in a different record. This is particularly important with written explanations, settlement communications, internal investigation material, and witness statements. One should never allow a short-term procedural advantage to create an unnecessary admission or inconsistency that undermines the broader defence.
Ultimately, these matters reward lawyers who can hold several perspectives at once: the legal merits, the regulatory risk, the criminal consequences, the governance dynamics, and the client’s commercial end goal. The question is not merely, “Can we win this proceeding?” It is also, “What does winning this proceeding do to the rest of the matter?” That broader discipline is what prevents one proceeding from undermining another. It also allows strategic litigation to remain what it should be: not litigation for its own sake, but a carefully sequenced means of protecting the client, preserving optionality, and moving towards a commercially workable resolution.
5. As a Tribunal Secretary certified by the Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre (HKIAC), you have a unique perspective on international arbitration proceedings. How has this experience influenced your approach to arbitration practice in India, and what lessons can Indian practitioners draw from global best practices?
Alok Vajpeyi:
The Tribunal Secretary certification by the Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre gave me an opportunity to look at arbitration from the other side of the table. As counsel, one is naturally consumed by the client’s case: the next pleading, the next application, the next witness, the next hearing. A tribunal, however, has to manage the proceeding as a whole. It must distinguish the genuinely decisive issues from the noise, give each party a fair opportunity to be heard, maintain procedural momentum, and eventually convert a large and often disordered record into a reasoned decision. Even without entering into the confidential substance of deliberations, seeing that administrative and decision-making architecture up close was extremely instructive.
The experience changed the way I think about evidence and written submissions. Tribunals do not experience a case in the order in which counsel prepare it; they see a bundle, a chronology, pleadings, witness statements, expert reports, and submissions, often against a tight procedural calendar. A written submission is effective when it gives the tribunal a reliable route through that material: what the issue is, where the evidence is, why the legal test matters, and what precise relief follows. It is ineffective when it repeats the pleadings, buries the point under excessive adjectives, or asks the tribunal to do the basic work of locating the evidence. I have become much more conscious of the difference between making an argument longer and making it easier to decide.
It also brought institutional differences into sharper focus. HKIAC proceedings tend to reflect a strong culture of procedural discipline, early case management, focused document production, and respect for the tribunal’s control over the timetable. Indian arbitration practice has changed substantially, but it can still carry habits inherited from court litigation: repeated adjournments, expansive pleadings, interlocutory skirmishes, and an assumption that oral submissions can compensate for an unstructured record. These are not absolute distinctions, and there are many exceptionally efficient Indian tribunals and institutions. But Indian practitioners can benefit from understanding that international arbitration is not simply litigation relocated to a different room; it has its own expectations around efficiency, proportionality, and tribunal-facing clarity.
The larger lesson was one of humility. Counsel are advocates, but tribunals are also trying to solve a difficult analytical and administrative problem with limited time and incomplete information. The more we understand that problem, the better we can present a case. I now think more carefully about the tribunal’s likely path through the record, the questions it may have after reading the submissions, and whether our proposed procedure is proportionate to the issue at hand. A senior arbitration practitioner once described the best advocacy to me as “making the tribunal’s job easier without making the client’s case smaller.” That is probably the most useful lesson I carried back into practice in India.
Alok Vajpeyi:
India has made real progress towards becoming a serious arbitration jurisdiction. The amendments to the Arbitration and Conciliation Act have addressed important concerns around time limits, interim relief, appointment of arbitrators, and institutionalisation. The evolution of India’s bilateral investment treaty regime has also forced a more mature conversation about the relationship between public power, investment protection, and dispute resolution. Institutions such as the Mumbai Centre for International Arbitration have added credibility and choice to the landscape, and Indian parties are increasingly comfortable selecting arbitration for complex domestic and cross-border contracts. It would be wrong to describe the Indian arbitration story as one of failure; the more accurate description is that reform has created momentum, but the legal culture has not yet caught up with all of it.
1. Greater judicial restraint. The most important requirement is continued discipline in the relationship between courts and arbitral tribunals. Parties need confidence that an award will not be re-litigated through an expansive challenge, and that interim or supervisory jurisdiction will not become a substitute for the arbitration itself. Courts have often articulated the right principle, but consistency and predictability matter as much as doctrinal formulation. A global arbitration hub is ultimately judged by what happens after the award, not only by how attractively the arbitration statute reads.
2. Stronger institutions and specialist judging. India needs arbitration institutions that parties trust to appoint tribunals transparently, administer cases efficiently, and maintain consistent standards. That requires investment in case management, trained staff, reliable hearing infrastructure, and published institutional practice. It would also help to develop specialist arbitration benches or judges who deal regularly with arbitration matters, so that complex issues are decided with both speed and doctrinal continuity. The objective is not to exclude generalist judges or practitioners, but to create a deeper pool of decision-makers who understand the technical and commercial demands of the field.
3. Better economics and broader participation. Arbitration must also become more cost-predictable. If proceedings take years, involve repeated procedural applications, and cost nearly as much as complex court litigation, parties will continue to treat arbitration as another layer of dispute rather than an efficient solution. Clearer fee structures, realistic timelines, stronger scrutiny of unnecessary procedural steps, and better use of technology can help. Alongside cost, the profession must take diversity seriously. A credible arbitration ecosystem should draw arbitrators from different regions, professional backgrounds, genders, and generations. Diversity is not a ceremonial objective; it broadens the range of commercial experience available to a tribunal and strengthens confidence in the process.
The harder reform is cultural. Indian businesses, government entities, and lawyers must stop treating arbitration as an “alternative” that can be postponed, diluted, or approached with the habits of ordinary litigation. It should be treated as a primary adjudicatory process, with serious attention paid at the contract-drafting stage, to the choice of institution and seat, and to the quality of evidence and advocacy that follows. That shift cannot be achieved by legislation alone. It requires institutions that deliver, courts that supervise without taking over, counsel who respect proportionality, and clients who understand that speed and preparation are linked.
I remain optimistic, but not uncritically so. India has the lawyers, the commercial disputes, the technical expertise, and the experience of operating within a sophisticated constitutional and judicial system. What it needs now is reliability: a party should know who will administer the case, how quickly the tribunal will be constituted, what a challenge will realistically involve, and when an award will become enforceable. A leading arbitration hub is not created by branding or by the number of conferences held. It is created when parties repeatedly choose the jurisdiction because the process is fair, efficient, commercially sensible, and predictable. As I see it, the next phase of reform is less about announcing new promises and more about delivering that experience consistently.
7. For young lawyers aspiring to build a career in commercial disputes and arbitration, what technical skills, professional qualities, and practical experiences do you believe are indispensable for long-term success in this highly competitive field?
Alok Vajpeyi:
My first piece of advice would be to learn to write before trying to sound like a lawyer. Clear legal writing is not a cosmetic skill; it is the first test of whether one has understood the facts, the issue, the evidence, and the relief being sought. A young lawyer should be able to reduce a complicated dispute to a clear chronology, identify the real questions that need an answer, and explain why the answer matters to the client. That requires repeated drafting, rewriting, and the willingness to remove one’s favourite sentence if it does not advance the argument. I still find that the best written submissions are not necessarily the most elaborate ones; they are the ones in which every paragraph appears to know why it is there.
Oral advocacy develops in the same way: through preparation that is more detailed than the final performance ever reveals. Moot courts are valuable not because a real hearing resembles a moot in every respect, but because they teach a young lawyer to identify the question, answer it directly, and remain composed when the premise of the argument is challenged. In practice, that discipline must be combined with commercial awareness. Read the client’s annual report, understand how the business makes money, know which contract or asset actually matters, and ask what a legal victory will mean operationally. A technically correct argument that ignores the client’s business can still be a poor piece of advice.
The less visible skills are equally important. Document management is not administrative work delegated away from the real case; in a commercial dispute, the document chronology may be the case. Learn to organise large records, identify the documents that help and hurt, and prepare a witness for cross-examination without scripting the evidence or teaching the witness to evade difficult facts. Cross-examination preparation is largely an exercise in listening, testing assumptions, and understanding what the witness can genuinely establish. The strongest questions usually come from a careful reading of the record, not from a desire to create a dramatic moment.
I would also encourage young lawyers to build a life of learning outside the immediate demands of a matter. Read business newspapers, company filings, biographies of business leaders, history, economics, and good journalism. Write articles, participate in moot courts, publish when there is something worth saying, and accept opportunities to teach or speak, because explaining a concept to another person exposes the gaps in one’s own understanding. At the same time, learn the softer disciplines of practice: manage client expectations honestly, keep colleagues informed, share credit, ask for help early, and treat feedback as part of the work rather than as a personal verdict. Disputes are team exercises, and reliability is often remembered longer than brilliance.
Finally, patience matters. The profession can make progress look invisible for long periods, particularly when one is doing the unglamorous work of reading files, preparing chronologies, or revising a note for the fourth time. Those habits accumulate. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote that “the life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience,” and I think the same is true of becoming a disputes lawyer. Experience is built by showing up prepared, being curious about the facts, taking responsibility when things go wrong, and remaining teachable. The aim is not to become the loudest person in the room; it is to become the person whose judgment the room can trust.
